Interesting Times

Terry Pratchett published Interesting Times in 1994, and it was the seventeenth of the Discworld novels. It takes place in the Aurient, his fictional counterpart of the Orient, and its title comes from the expression, usually presented as a Chinese curse, about living in interesting times.

Two gods, Fate and the Lady, are playing against each other over who sits on the throne of the Agatean Empire, which lies on the Counterweight Continent, and the game turns on a demand sent to the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork: that the Great Wizzard come to the empire. The spelling, with two zeds, is the one on Rincewind's hat, so he is the man the wizards of Unseen University decide to send, whether he likes it or not.

Getting him there is a problem of its own. They lift him off the desert island he has been living on since the events of Eric, using the machine they call Hex, and they offer him a wizard's rank he had never earned, on condition that he agree to go; since teleportation requires an exchange of mass, he arrives in Agatea at enormous speed and lands in a snowbank.